As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Magnetic tape data storage devices are commonly used with information handling systems to write, read, and store data. Since its introduction over fifty years ago, magnetic tape has remained a popular data storage format despite the development of alternative media such as compact disks, USB flash drives, memory sticks, and others. One beneficial feature of magnetic tape is that it remains the most inexpensive and efficient means for storing or archiving large volumes of data. With advancing technology, high density magnetic tape has allowed for individual tape devices to provide increasingly greater data storage capacity. Further, large quantities of magnetic tape devices can be housed within automated tape libraries and serviced by shared read-write units, which allows for enhanced organization and rapid access of data. Additionally, magnetic tape allows for erasing and modifying data unlike many other media formats, such as read-only compact disks.
To increase the data storage capacity in high density tape devices, advancing technology has made it possible to utilize increasingly thinner magnetic tape in tape storage devices. However, such thin tape is often fragile, and thus susceptible to damage in the normal course of use. For example, edge damage, wrinkles, cupping, and compression creep are common with today's thinner tapes, despite the increased sophistication of tape paths and tension methods within tape drives.
Given the present methods by which tape drives read and write to magnetic tape, the likelihood of tape damage presents a drawback to storing data to tape. Currently, a write head writes data to magnetic tape and an error detection technique is then performed to determine whether the data write was successful. Any damage or defect in the magnetic tape may result in data corruption, whereby the tape drive may respond by issuing a soft write error and may then re-attempt to write the intended data. If the second attempt is unsuccessful, the tape drive may issue a hard write or fatal error message and may abort read-write operations. This may occur at the damaged location each time data is attempted to be written to the tape regardless of how minimal the damaged area is, or how much undamaged tape remains beyond the damaged area. Thus, based on current methods, many high capacity magnetic tape cartridges are rendered unusable, and often discarded, despite retaining a large amount of unused data storage capacity.